Heavily charged empty gestures

Two years ago, the Dutch Minister for Integration and Immigration (the now infamous Rita Verdonk) went to visit a Mosque in the Netherlands. The cleric that met her refused to shake her hand out of a religious feeling that it is wrong to touch a woman who is not his wife. The minister was enraged. Surely, in the Netherlands, shaking hands is a sign of respect - does not a minister deserve respect? More recently, Queen Beatrix agreed beforehand not to shake hands with Muslims she was to meet, drawing further comment from right-wing nationalists about the apparent abandonment of national values.

In order to defuse the religious context, imagine a different scenario. You manage a small team of people in an office somewhere. Because you get to boss around people all day long, you buy your staff a glass of orange-juice at the end of each day. There is no obligation for you to do this, but everybody likes to have a chat to review the day and it strengthens the team spirit - it has become tradition. Then, you hire someone new. He works hard and fits in nicely, but he does not share this daily drink with his colleagues. He does not offer an explanation; he just prefers to chat without the free drink. Just as the cleric did not heed the minister's sign of respect and equality, your new employee does not heed your established symbol of collegiality. Should you be as angry as Ms Verdonk?

No. You buy the orange-juice because you like your staff: you do not like your staff because you buy them orange-juice. The point is that none of these things is meaningful in themselves: they serve as symbols and not as goals in themselves. The orange-juice is a symbol of collegiality, the handshake a symbol of mutual respect: you shake hands because you wish to show respect. If a handshake has a different meaning to the other person (if you do not share the meaning of symbols) it is pointless to shake hands regardless. This does not mean the other has no respect for you. Symbols like these are but signposts to the underlying meanings: the absence of the signpost does not mean absence of the meaning.

Besides, there are suitable alternatives that convey the same meaning - like placing a hand over your heart or just smiling warmly. After all, if your new colleague does stay around and is the nicest person at work, it is childish to resent him for not sharing a drink. Just like it is childish to ridicule someone for not shaking your hand.

Liberalism and relativism make necessary bedfellows

Elsewhere on this page the frontiers of liberalism are explored, so this post will delve into its heartland. I take relativism to be one of the principles of liberalism, although it is not very often mentioned explicitly. Relativism is a controversial approach to ethics, as it questions the existence of a universal set of ethical rules. Briefly, it means that if person A holds one ethical opinion, and person B another, it is impossible to determine which opinion is correct, as both persons have an equal right to be correct. Relativism claims, therefore, that it is all-right to hold a certain opinion, but it is wrong to condemn anyone for having another opinion. It is the direct opposite of bigotry.

While this sounds appealing, it is only too easy to come up with lots of examples that most people will find very hard to accept as ethically correct—just think of any atrocity wherein the perpetrator was convinced he was in the right. Some thinkers believe that therefore relativism is not a satisfactory ethical theory: it fails to condemn some acts that surely must be wrong. These judgements, however, are often made from a certain point of view, often one that does not itself contain the norms of the society or individual whose act(s) must be wrong. The testing of an ethical theory by means of certain acts that must be wrong, implies determining beforehand which acts must be wrong: before testing relativism as an ethical theory, some other ethical theory (or just instinct) determined the required outcomes for relativism to pass the test. This hardly seems fair. Besides this, there are countless examples also of individuals who turned out to be right, even though they were reviled by their environment.

(In order not to clutter this page with philosophical ramblings, this post will continue as comment on itself.)